Aim Here

If we're thinking about taking on another keeper, we must be about to hoof two of the ones we have out the door.

One of your John Hume's is missing a 'Deadly Duo' where it's been wrongly attached to Prince Philip.

More likely he's maxing out the solo shot bonuses by picking 15 folk nobody else has picked - which is perhaps less obnoxious than him peeping at your picks and depriving you of a solo, but also a more effective form of abusing his powers!

Did you calculate this by taking the distance between the towns and dividing by the motorway speed limit, because you reckon drivers are able to drive at the limit for the entire journey?

Probably on the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" principle. I recall one of Efe's finest games was at ER against Livingston, where he skinned so many Livi players in the first half that they stopped trying to take the ball off him in the second; the run of play was that Hibs would get the ball, pass to Bogdan, who threw it to Efe, who would saunter, unchallenged, into the final third in order to start an attack, which Livi would defend and then the ball would get taken off them and the cycle repeated many times over. It was one of that dismal run of games prior to Lennon and Hibs mutually consenting to part ways, and it ended up a draw, but presumably Efe's performance stuck in the collective Livingston consciousness the way it stuck in mine...

Thing is, though, if these estimates are in the right ballpark (I think they're a tad high), St Johnstone's ST numbers don't seem that bad in comparison to other top tier teams - the worst cases, by far, are Livingston or Hamilton. Apart from the obvious edge-cases (the arsecheeks, for obvious reasons, and Ross County, where the catchment area is a bit ill-defined), the ratio of St Johnstone's ST holders to Perth's population is roughly par for the course, and only slightly on the low side. I suspect that the problem is that in the current climate, you only get about 5% of the population regularly showing up to see their local team these days, and trying to get more than that is an uphill struggle, fighting against the impulse to gloryhunt the OF and EPL, and against other forms of entertainment. Having said that, the numbers suggest that Motherwell and Kilmarnock have a much higher rate of ST uptake than the average; Killie's got a boost presumably on the back of recent results, while I don't know about Motherwell. Maybe it's a case of 'do whatever Motherwell does', unless the reason for Motherwell's relatively high ST uptake is that it's slurping up a ton of fans from the Hamilton side of the tracks, which isn't an easy option for a team based in Perth.

I approve of this development, because it actually annoys our Corporate Overlords when they find that their trademarks are diluted and unenforceable as their product names get absorbed into common everyday use. Also, there's no point bothering with prescriptive language use, you're in a Cnut-style fight against inevitable forces of nature. Give up now while there's hope for you.

Rule quibble. There's a loophole that should be closed off, to wit: I reckon for future pools, this should be altered so that you're not allowed to kill any entrants into the pool yourself, regardless of whose pool they're in. It could well be in your interests to murder members of someone else's pool prematurely to stop them getting their Deadly December/Last Gasp bonuses. At the moment, it could well be good strategy to pull the plug on someone's life support machine on November 30th in a close-run contest. I know that heading off a St Andrew's Day Massacre is very much a theoretical problem, because people aren't absolute maniacs willing to commit murder over a marginal advantage in a dumb forum game, but 1) closing it off helps insure against any fallout if the worst ever happens and 2) this is the season for "worst-of" P&B posters threads and I've been reminded that we do have some weapons-grade roasters skulking about.

I think that's just a late writeup from the BBC. She died early enough to get a mention in the 2019 pool thread

Was. I think he was emptied fairly early last year.

With 16 podium entries between the two awards, I suspect that the Hibs contingent sweep the awards purely through quantity, if nothing else. A tremendous collective effort.

Look, I know how to spell V*E*N*D*E*T*T*A, and it took three or four edits before I realised that it's P&B doing this, and not me! What's the opposite of autocorrect called and why is P&B doing this to me?

There's a poster called McGarci who sometimes posts in the Hearts threads with fairly poor English. Pet Jeden has decided that he can't possibly be what he claims - a Spanish guy who happens to support Hearts, having lived in Edinburgh for a while - and has a one-man vandetta to unmask him as a hoaxer; doubling and tripling down on it even when Tynierose pointed out that he's only ever posted here from a Spanish IP address.

Hey, I gave my BawWatchin' vote for best Celtic poster, since I knew that the slot would be empty! Are you sure you counted these up properly?

Wrong decade, perhaps. Ludo posted exactly 2 entries in the last calendar year. There are 17 more to go. If he maintains this rate, we're on course to see the thread finished before the end of 2029, though his rate of posting does seem to slow down over time so it's definitely touch and go.

I didn't initially recognize a non-round and hirsute Aly McCoist (back row, far right, if your memory is as hazy as mine). Also from a bit of digging, the bald moustachioed guy beside the keepers is John Weir, ~30 years old at the time! 2nd team coach Dennis Lawson, apparently.

Here comes the twist ... he doesn't exist.

Last time you guys were in a mid-season tailspin, you hired Steve Clarke and turned into a juggernaut, so I'll hang off assuming the worst. Also, it's about 4% likelihood of going down, because there's also a ~50% chance of losing the playoffs...

I was in the mood to suck the joy out of fitba' with some statistics so I put the last season-and-a-half into a python script, calculated an Elo-based ranking of the team strengths, and then resimulated the rest of the league 10,000 times to get a rough guess as to where the teams would end up. Here, columns are the league positions, rows are the teams, and the values are the percentage chance that a team is predicted to be in that position at the end of the season. Take this with a giant heap of salt, in that this requires some statistical assumptions (Elo parameters were just tuned to something vaguely sensible, and I fitted a probability distribution of goal differences by eyeballing a graph), and some football ones (manager changes and transfer windows might radically change a team's strength - Killie and Hearts would be the obvious top contenders for a rapid change in form). And the method is probably complete bollocks from the get-go, of course. (To keep myself honest on that last point, after the event, I checked the technique with other seasons since the split came into force; the predicted last-place from this method was actually last placed 13 times out of 18, with the last-placed predictee coming second-last 4 times, and the one 'other' case was 2013-14 where Hearts - the predicted loser - were officially last due to a points deduction and only second-last in terms of game results. The most anomalous historical prediction was that it predicted Aberdeen would be the most likely to win in 2014-15, albeit with only a marginally higher percentage than Celtic - 35% to 31% - so it wasn't too sure of itself, and it did successfully predict Aberdeen coming 9th in 2011, despite everything). Anyways, statistics confirms what we all knew already - Hearts are dugshite and it's a 70% chance they're going down...

Munoz responding to every single mention of his name by frantically hunting down another gif of Mark E Smith or Johnny Rotten to show how little he's bothered. It's hard to tell whether he's jumping up and down with glee at all the attention, or inwardly seething at how nobody likes him. Whichever one it is, the one thing he's not, though, is 'not bothered'.

The gulf between Aberdeen/Motherwell and whoever is in 5th place is bigger than the hole that Hearts have dug themselves into, IMO.

The least of our worries, sadly.

85 and one day exactly. Miguel missed out on 57 bonus points because the inconsiderate sod hung on a day too long.

He really rattled you guys, huh? More of the same please, Scotty.

A jobbing professional footballer writes: From someone with experience of both clubs, 30 minutes on the pitch as injury cover for Hibs back line > spending most of 2016/17 as a first-team pick for Hearts.